We were sitting down last night, chilling out after dinner and flipping channels.  We landed on the John Jon and Kate Plus 8 Christmas episode, one of the kids was singing “Joy to the world, the time has come” and I finished it with “for Lisa to recieve her slime”.  Which was what Lisa had sung once on the old kids TV show You Can’t Do That On Television following her sliming.

First, I marveled at the fact that I even remembered the song, then at the fact that I remembered her name.  Then I went further and remembered some of the other characters, Moose, Vanessa, Doug and Alex.  Alex was wrong, I was actually remembering Alasdair, but I was close.

Of course this prompted me to lunge for the lappy and hit YouTube, ya KNOW there’s got to be some YCDTOTV there…  I wasn’t disappointed

• Show opening
  
• Clip: Barth and the Health Inspector
• Clip: Barth and the Health Inspector II
• Clip: Locker Jokes
• Clips: Divorce Episode: One, Two and Three

That’s just a few, there’s more with sliming and water dumping and all of the other fun junk they used to do.  It’s amazing how much I remember from this show, it was like sitting down with an old friend.

If you were a fan as a kid, check out http://www.ycdtotv.com.  It has a lot of history about the show and other good stuff.  Good times

Not much to talk about, just killing some time and I thought I’d share…

Movies

In the movie dept, I have some ones to see and ones to avoid.  Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead is certainly worth checking out.  You don’t walk away from this flick feeling good, but it’s a helluva story.  Owning Mahowney is another unhappy tale that was told VERY well.  I’ve been a huge fan of Philip Seymour Hoffman lately, he was great in both of those flicks..  Worthy rentals.  Oh and Cloverfield should get a mention, I really liked the way that was filmed and how it ended.  Well done!

I’ve seen some REALLY bad ones lately.  The three that come to mind are Diary of the Dead, Teeth and The Mist, I’m not even going to link to them, rubbish if you ask me, but easy to google rubbish.  I knew Teeth wouldn’t be amazing, but I had some hope for it, there were a couple of moments that I enjoyed, mostly scenery.  Other than that, I can only sum it up with “blah”.  The Mist is yet another King book that just didn’t translate to film.  It started off great, right up until the lame-ass tentacle pulled the Sherminator to his death I was enthralled.  After that I was paying more attention to my stale popcorn.

TV

Not much happening on the TV front, we just finished watching season 1 of Californication.  What a GREAT show!  Do yourself a favor, rent it from where-ever you get your videos and spend a weekend day on it.  You won’t regret it

That’s enough for passive activity…

Fishing

Been doing a good amount of fishing this year.  I can’t say that I’ve caught a lot, but I’ve been having a ton of fun out there on the Atlantic with Cap’n Jim.  You just haven’t had Striper until you’ve pulled it in yourself, and eaten it ultra fresh.  Damn fine eating.

That’s all for now, gotta jet, hope you’re having a kickin’ summer

OK, so I had a fun ass day. Yesterday I sent a message to the GNHLUG folks so I could get a recommendation on an IMAP server. I got a few and had to decide between Dovecot and Courier. Both are open source solutions and the winner will be running on my Debian Etch (Linux for those that don’t know) box (which is in a VMware virtual machine).

I decided to implement IMAP so that I could hit my mail from multiple clients instead of just mutt. While I have no problem just using mutt, I can’t ask Natalie to. It’s a console program (no pretty clicky menus) and driven by keyboard shortcuts that have meaning for me and nobody else in the world. I have an email folder that gets all of the notifications of online statements from all of the people we have to give our money to each month. I want her to be able to look at it if she chooses. Yeah, I could forward messages to her mail account or go about this any other number of ways, but setting up a mail server gives me other benee’s and it’s just fun to play with this stuff.

I won’t bore you with the details of configuring the server or making the config changes I needed in my mail clients, but I will tell you that I went with Dovecot and that both mutt and Thunderbird are amazingly flexible and powerful tools. I loved them before, I want to marry them now.

Since I’ve been using mutt for a couple of years now, I’ve grown very accustomed to managing email from 9 accounts (and a lot of it) with folders in one program. I’ve got it set up so that a particular email address and PGP key is selected based on what folder I’m composing/replying to messages in. It’s VERY handy. I never have to worry about which email address is responding to what list or friend. As long as my mail filtering is working properly, my client does the work. That all probably sounds confusing, so as an example, if I’m replying to a message in my Gmail folder, then the program knows that I want to reply with my @gmail.com address and the corresponding PGP key. I wanted the same capability in my GUI client. Enter Thunderbird and the “Enigmail” and “Folder Account” add-ons. It allows me to do just that, I simply need to select which identity to assign to a particular folder and I’m done. It really is that easy. It takes a few minutes to configure your identities and the GPG keys that go with them, a few changes to folder properties and BAM!

Folks, try doing that with Outlook. I’ll wait… Oh you couldn’t? Not surprising, MS doesn’t think you want to use PGP so it’s not an option. Never mind how common and effective it is. You’ll have to go out and buy PGP Desktop. No thanks, I’ll stick with the open source programs that have great devs & users who contribute to the project. The combination just produces far superior tools. That’s *almost* all from the Outlook bashing front for today, but there’ll prolly be more later. I’ve been using it at work for a few weeks now and it SUCKS. The ONLY thing it does right is integrate mail and calendaring if you have a MAPI backend, other than that… meh. There, now that really is the last of the OL smash for today.

So I now have all I wanted from my mail server and I’m super pleased. It took almost no time to set up. It would have gone even faster if I had any sed or shell scripting skills. Ahh well, something to work on.

Soooo, you’ve been using IE to visit sordid sites and now your machine is fouled up with all sorts of malware. This mess was avoidable, so clean your machine and put on a browser prophylactic before indulging in your favorite solitary past times again…

What you’ll need:

SeaMonkey
NoScript
MultiZilla/MultiViews [optional]

Overview:

We’re going to be installing the SeaMonkey (SM) browser and it’ll be used to view sites that you don’t trust (you decide what that means in this instance, I’ll define it as anything that would appall your mother). NoScript and Multizilla are add-ons for SM, NoScript will prevent web pages from running scripts (java, etc) and potentially mucking up your machine, Multizilla will give SM some extra clean-up options.

01: Installing SeaMonkey

Download and install SM, I opted to install only the browser, you can perform a complete install if you want to check out all of the open source tools provided in the suite. I also opted not to use Quick Launch.

Following the installation, SM will launch and ask if you want to make it your default browser, answer No.

02: Enhancing/Protecting SeaMonkey

Using SM, open http://noscript.net/getit and click the "Install Noscript latest version*" link. You will be asked if you want to install the software, you do, click the Install button. You will be asked if you want to install NoScript to your profile, click OK. You should see a dialog explaining that NoScript has been successfully installed and will be available to you when you restart the browser. Click OK to dismiss the notification.

Still using SM, open http://multizilla.mozdev.org/installation/installation.html. This page can be a little confusing, don’t install the experimental nightlies, you want to scroll down until you see "Free MultiZilla [Installation] or [Download]", click the Installation button, you will again be asked if you want to continue, click the Install button. The next dialog will tell you to "Select OK, for a single user installation or Cancel, for a multi-user installation", click the OK button. If there are no problems, you’ll be told the install was a success and to restart your browser, click the OK button to dismiss the notification.

03: Configuring SeaMonkey

Close all open SM windows (if you opted to install and use Quick Launch you’ll want to close out of that as well). Now start SM again. It’s going to start with an open sidebar (F9 or View > Show/Hide > Sidebar to kill it) and some extra tool bars which I tend to hide (F12 to hide the MultiZilla bar & F1 to hide the Personal bar).

Now to configure MultiZilla: Choose Edit > Preferences select MultiZilla and click Open Preference Manager. Select the Privacy header and put a check into the boxes next to the options below:

• Clear disk cache on exit
• Clear location bar history on exit
• Clear global history on exit
• Clear all cookies on exit
• Clear download history on exit
• Clear all form data on exit

Now select the Sessions header, on the Save Behavior tab, choose Don’t Save Sessions, on the Restore Behavior tab choose Don’t Restore Sessions.

Note: There are other settings you can tweak to manage cookies and other content both in MuliZilla prefs and SM prefs. It’s up to you how paranoid you want to be.

04: Start Browsing

At this point we’re ready to go. SeaMonkey will clear its cache, history, etc when you exit the program and all scripts are disabled on all pages. You’ll notice that when you go to a page that has a script, a yellow notification bar will open in the bottom of your browser window, in that bar there’s an Options button. Clicking it will allow you to grant that site the ability to run scripts either permanently or temporarily, that way if you really NEED some functionality and NoScript blocks it, you can allow it.

Notes:

From time to time, SeaMonkey, NoScript and MultiZilla will let you know that there’s an update available for them. I would suggest installing the updates as they present themselves. They can add functionality and security fixes.

I’m not promising that this will keep your machine free and clear of malware, but it goes a long way to prevent infection. It’s certainly safer than using IE (switch to Firefox already!). YMMV.

While this was aimed at Windows users, NoScript and MultiZilla work just as well on the Linux release of SeaMonkey, don’t forget to install them if that’s your OS of choice

http://blogs.zdnet.com/security/?p=845

Real Player got a slap in the mouth from stopbadware.org. I can’t think of a mainstream program that deserves it more! I’ve had many an issue with the application acting like it owns MY computer in the past. I love to see bad/annoying programs punished.

Long ago I found Real Alternative and I’ve never once looked back or found a single real media file I couldn’t play. If you dread the Real headaches, check out the alternative.

There’s a QuickTime alternative as well, I use it on any Windows machine that has no need for iTunes. Both of the alternatives are great projects and those of you who detest overbearing software owe it to yourself to give them a look. That said, you’ll be responsible for keeping them up to date. There’s no automatic update programs for these solutions (gotta take the good with the bad).